Ubuntu servers taken offline by "sustained, cross-border attack"

Ubuntu servers taken offline by "sustained, cross-border attack"(arstechnica.com)

129 points by RattlesnakeJake 16 days ago | 28 comments

sdoering 16 days ago |

Dupe. More comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47972213

andai 16 days ago |

Is this somehow preventing server updates? e.g. to keep the recent vulnerability unpatched for longer?

I'm not sure if that makes sense, I think the apt mirrors are all over the place, hosted by universities etc.

loloquwowndueo 16 days ago | |

If you have a mirror configured, you likely won’t be prevented from downloading upgrades.

Some Ubuntu repository urls may live in the affected Canonical infrastructure and those would be affected, but you can switch your apt sources list file to, for example, a country mirror and you’ll be mostly ok.

chopin 15 days ago | | |

How do the mirrors get upgraded?

jcgrillo 16 days ago | |

Won't the mirrors themselves be unable to get updates from Canonical, though? Or do they distribute them some other way?

tcp_handshaker 16 days ago |

It seems Ubuntu infra is hosted at cloud provider? All have the mechanisms to protect from these types of attacks. Is this an architecure design failure?

loloquwowndueo 16 days ago | |

Which cloud provider? Unless things have changed, Canonical runs their own servers by leasing racks in data centres. Since one of their main offerings is managed Openstack, they favor running things on their in-house openstack deployment instead of using a public cloud (AWS etc).

esseph 16 days ago | |

If the DDoS is from residential proxies and high volume it becomes a real problem to shut down.

pixel_popping 15 days ago | | |

It can't be shutdown if the means are there, if the means are superior from the attacker than the target, then it can remain permanently offline. Talking from experience.

tonymet 16 days ago |

When asked for ransom terms, the attackers said, “no more systemd”

throw1234567891 16 days ago | |

Systemd is fine. Maybe you mean “no more snaps”.

tonymet 16 days ago | | |

I didn’t even know Ubuntu had snaps. Hadn’t used it in 10 years.

2ndorderthought 16 days ago | |

I'm scratching my head on this one too. What is there to even gain? Kids these days

tonymet 15 days ago | | |

I thought hating systemd was for geriatrics

strenholme 16 days ago |

Maybe they’re trying to block access to this URL: https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2026-31431

To address that, here is how to disable that local root access in Ubuntu 24.04:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957409

306bobby 16 days ago | |

Well at least for now that page loads for me

ghostly_s 16 days ago | | |

the blog post linked from there with remediation instructions, however, does not.

1. https://ubuntu.com/blog/copy-fail-vulnerability-fixes-availa...

aussieguy1234 16 days ago |

It's an Iranian state based actor.

They're targeting the most popular Linux distro, likely to prevent access to patches for the CopyFail attack so they can use it to do even more damage.

(CopyFail allows any unprivileged user to be elevated to root very easily)

recursivegirth 16 days ago | |

Worth calling out that CopyFail can be trivially patched. I did so on my personal devices + remote servers. The attack vector is apparently only typically utilized for exploits anyways, it supposedly has little practical/legitimate use.

This article has instructions on how to self-patch: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-linux-cop...

anotherviewhere 16 days ago | |

Why would they attack Ubuntu? I would understand if the attack target would be Anthropic, OpenAI and other US fascists. Why Ubuntu?

RattlesnakeJake 15 days ago | | |

My first thought is that it's a default base image for a lot of containers, which also include an `apt update` in the Dockerfile. If Iran wants to cripple US industry, then taking down the update servers could screw up a lot of deployment processes

_DeadFred_ 16 days ago |

dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975729

scorpioxy 16 days ago |

cross-border attack? The internet doesn't have borders. The title of the article has nothing to do with the title submitted here.

edit: I should probably add more context as some commenters didn't understand. The DDOS attack is likely coming from compromised IoT devices. Most, if not all, of the big ones in the last few years(decades?) were that. Unless all the devices are located within a specific country and non are within the US then I think it is silly to use that term to imply that this is some sort of war from across the border. The reporting is fine for what they know so far, the submitted title is not.

nomel 16 days ago | |

> The internet doesn't have borders.

The overwhelming majority of internet connected devices have an internet connection that's physically connected, for 99.9??% of the distance, with wires or fiber cables, to every other user in the world, with a very nearby wireless hop at the ends. If the cables weren't so fragile, you could pull on your wifi AP and they would see their wifi AP (or maybe nearby cell tower) move.

The tiny fraction of the rest is passed by shining RF transmitters to some distant receiver, separated by some physical distance, to some base station sitting on the ground within a border.

hdgvhicv 16 days ago | | |

I would hazard the majority of devices are connected via cellular today.

dirasieb 16 days ago | |

the real world (the place where ubuntu servers are hosted) does have borders, singing kumbaya won’t stop terrorists from attacking western infrastructure

also, “cross-border attack” is a direct quotation from canonical by ars technica, take it up with them